noodsletter #.0010
Lettuces, dressings, and this message WILL BE clipped
Hello!
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This week I’m trying something different, as Substack is telling me this is too long for Gmail accounts, and the message will be clipped. I’m going to publish anyway? You may have to click through. We’ll see what happens!
This week’s recipe:
A Salad Dressing*
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Book
Odrade keyed the intercom to her private kitchen. “Lunch for three, Duana. Something special. You choose.”
Lunch, when it came, featured a dish Odrade especially enjoyed, a veal casserole. Duana displayed a delicate touch with herbs, a bit of rosemary in the veal, the vegetables not overcooked. Superb.
Odrade savored every bite. The other two plodded through the meal, spoon-to-mouth, spoon-to-mouth.
Is this one of the reasons I am Mother Superior and they are not?
From Chapterhouse: Dune by Frank Herbert.
I am honestly quite sick of Frank Herbert, and I’ve slowed down quite a bit because these last two have been excruciatingly boring, but I’ve come to perversely enjoy his unimaginative descriptions of meals. I realize it’s ridiculous for someone who has read thousands of pages of an author to complain about their writing, but if you have so little to say about something, why bother? I want to note, too, that this character supposedly has immediate access to (the female) half of humankind’s genetic memory, and this is all she can muster, a bit of rosemary, the vegetables aren’t overcooked. “Superb.”
“News”
My admiration for Dennis Lee should be well known, but I find it darkly funny that his primer on using chopsticks is demonstrated with Korean chopsticks, which I find to be far and away the hardest chopsticks to use.
Modern-day slavery in Georgia, uncovered by “Operation Blooming Onion.”
This is literally the beginning of the end of the world according to every sci-fi franchise in history: “World's first living robots can now reproduce, scientists say.”
As far as meme content goes, these ukiyo-e parodies are amazing.
Insightful piece on the problem with “the refugee cookbook.”
I am a little tired of the common wisdom, often repeated by both food media’s glossiest and most progressive publications, that food has the power to unite us.
Congrats to the workers at the only unionized Starbucks in America!
Domestic shrimp aquaculture is the only way forward, it is known, and now L.A. knows. (Still needs to become more economical, of course.)
Even in a hundred years, I don’t know if I’d eat an oyster from the waters around New York City.
In lieu of the customary Clickhole link, have this large pot brownie instead.
My colleague Maggie let me know that last noodsletter’s reference to iekei ramen led her down an internet rabbit hole to this: Japan’s first (?) poop museum.
The most interesting fact in this piece about celebrity fast food promotions is Mariah Carey ONLY EATS NORWEGIAN SALMON AND CAPERS.
What the hell kind of advice is this? “Yes, I excused you.”???????
That viral piece about the Michelin-starred restaurant and the ceramic mouth? I tried to read it, but I begged off when the writer said they felt “like a character in a Dickensian novel.”
NYC Public Health Policy Review Haiku
They’re sending people
Free, at-home testing kits now?
After two dang years?
Recipe
A Salad Dressing
I realize this isn’t exactly seasonal. I doubt many farmers are pulling up heads of lettuce these days, although you never know with this weather; as I write this it’s 55 degrees and the day’s barely started yet, and of course it’s mid-December. I have been feeling nostalgic for the lettuces we were eating not too long ago—the photos below are from just before Thanksgiving—and I’ve consequently been eating supermarket lettuce, which I don’t really recommend but the thing about that is lettuce is generally delicious, so you make do/what you can with what you have on hand.
But look at these lettuces! They’re beautiful (from Willow Wisp), even in these pictures, but you can also see, or maybe just get an inkling, of how they are texturally superior to the sad stuff that’s perennially available in the supermarket. I don’t even mean the mixed lettuce bags or the clamshells with individual leaves in various states of rot. The whole heads of lettuces, their bruised exterior leaves (always bruised!), stripped away, the relatively unblemished leaves underneath—I mean that when I say “sad stuff”—waterlogged from the odd spraying system every market seems to have adopted, as if a car wash were ever a good idea for watering your house plants. But the textural difference isn’t that the lettuce in your supermarket is sopping wet, it has to do both with the thickness of the leaves and the thickness of whatever the leaf’s barrier is against moisture. You can feel both of these things, just rub a leaf between your thumb and fingers: a leaf of supermarket lettuce will feel very smooth, as if the repeated car washes have abraded its exterior (that is, if it doesn’t immediately rip); a leaf of nice lettuce will feel rough to the touch, a little like the textured surface of good extruded pasta.
And the flavor, of course, is different, or maybe not different but merely present, all the more so because good lettuce is lettuce you can chew. I sometimes think of supermarket lettuce as fulfilling the same function as bean sprouts—vegetal tasting water encapsulated in a crisp vehicle, excellent with salt—but good lettuce actually tastes lettuce-y, an experience so rare as to defy any description. (One day maybe I’ll take a crack at describing celtuce.)
Regardless of whether or not your lettuce is good, it'll want a dressing, and I am firmly against bottled dressings of any kind, in part because salad dressing is easy to make, in part because I’m very, very cheap about certain things, and in part because I truly enjoy this very simple vinaigrette that I’ve been eating for most of my life. It works well with almost any kind of salad, as it’s very basic and, consequently, versatile, although I most often use it for a mixed lettuce salad or with macerated cucumbers, that is, cucumbers that have been salted, allowed to sit for at least thirty minutes, then drained/patted dry, which gives them a paradoxically crisp but tender texture. (Macerating is non-negotiable when dealing with North American slicing cucumbers and English cucumbers, less necessary with Persians or other good cucumbers.)
Before we get to the dressing, I want to plug my favorite salad spinner. Don’t have a salad spinner? Well, you should get one. Lettuce leaves must be washed, even those that have already been put through the car wash, or the express car wash known as “triple washed,” and they must then be dried thoroughly, so that whatever they’re dressed with won’t get waterlogged and/or not stick, and the most convenient way to wash and dry lettuce is with a salad spinner. I don’t recommend those spinners with the push button spinner mechanism…I, in fact, hate them, mostly because apparently every food publication recommends them and therefore a lot of people have them, and I’ve used them a lot. I much prefer this one (don’t worry, neither an Amazon nor affiliate link), and what I like about it is it feels sturdy as heck and the spinning mechanism is a pull cord. My only caveat is that “sturdy as heck” does not apply to the top, which you should never drop, ever. I’ve owned three of these over 15 years, and dropped the top three times. But I keep coming back!
When making a vinaigrette, your goal is to make an emulsion, which is basically just a mixture of two immiscible things: oil and water. There are several ways to do this, all of them involving agitation, but by far the easiest way to do this is to combine the ingredients for the vinaigrette in a relatively small, sealable container, like a mason jar, and then to shake the hell out of it. Another way to go about this is to use a blender, either a countertop one (if you’re making a larger amount of vinaigrette) or an immersion one, which will create an emulsion but can introduce odd flavors to the vinaigrette if you use olive oil; you also end up having to do a fair amount of cleaning for making a salad, which seems both unnecessary and cruel. You can, of course, use a bowl and a whisk to make salad dressing: classic, low-tech, of medium difficulty, as far as this process goes. I, however, use a little cereal bowl and a fork, which has a very high chance of failure and is therefore weirdly stressful, but it has the benefit of creating the fewest amount of dishes and introduces an element of uncertainty to dinner every night: Will we be eating a good salad or an oily and wet mess?
Because the goal of an emulsion is to bind all the flavorful stuff you put in a dressing into a semi-viscous, seemingly homogenous mixture that can evenly coat each leaf of lettuce without making it soggy. The texture of the dressing combined with the texture on the surface of the leaves effectively means each leaf can be coated with just enough dressing, as they cling to each other, and thus you can achieve (very briefly) crisp leaves of lettuce coated in just enough dressing to accentuate their flavor, rather than the common (and not entirely unpleasant) experience of having soggy lettuce leaves serve as a vehicle for delicious things like ranch.
All that being said, I strongly urge you to use the mason jar method, and to just shake the hell out of the thing, adding oil as you go, until the mixture is creamy. The same principle applies with the cereal bowl and fork method (or the mixing bowl and whisk), but if you dump everything into the bowl and mix you’ll never get anywhere unless you’re Magnus Magnusson (remember him!?) and you have to instead drizzle olive oil in a thin, steady stream, mixing as you go.
Fancy olive oils (which are very much worth it) sometimes have these dispenser tops that are designed specifically for the purpose, which makes things more convenient, but they aren’t necessary; you can become reasonably good at drizzling olive oil in with a more conventional pour spout, although the attendant risk of failure is a little higher. If you fail, don’t throw it away: just dress your bad salad, eat it, consider the error of your ways, and try again another day (or just use a mason jar!).
(If you go with the mason jar, add just a little more olive oil than the volume of the acid, shake until emulsified, then add more to taste. The classic vinaigrette ratio is 3:1 oil:acid, but I like it closer to 2:1…less creamy, but more aggressively flavorful.)
One of the ways you can increase your chance of fork-whisking success is to stabilize your mixing bowl, as you’ll need both hands free to pour in your oil while whisking, and the best way to do that is to swaddle the bowl in a kind of kitchen towel diaper or nest:
As to seasoning the vinaigrette, I use just a pinch of salt, as the large-ish quantity of Dijon I use is sufficiently salty, and because before you add the dressing to your washed and spun lettuce leaves you should salt them semi-aggressively. The salt not only seasons the leaves, it also sticks to them, which in turn helps the dressing adhere. While I only added minced garlic, minced shallot is a good addition, and both of them help with the emulsification process; think of the little pieces like ten million mini whisks that help to disperse the water in the oil as you fling them around the bowl. Finally, you may find it odd that there are two kinds of acid called for, but I believe using two different acids offers a kind of balance, if not in pH, then in flavor; I have nothing scientific to back this up, but the same idea motivated the dressing for the sardines I included in a previous noodsletter.
Makes enough dressing for four small servings of salad
Ingredients*:
Juice from half a lemon
Splash of red wine vinegar
1 garlic clove, minced
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
Good olive oil
pinch of salt
Salad, spun and washed, in a very large mixing bowl, ready for dressing
Combine lemon juice, vinegar, and garlic in a mixing bowl and let sit at least 15 minutes.
Add dijon mustard and stir to combine thoroughly.
In a slow and steady stream, drizzle oil into mixture while whisking continuously until a creamy emulsion forms. The amount of oil you add is determined first by the quantity of vinegar in the bowl, and second by your taste. Once the mixture becomes creamy and homogenous, taste and consider whether you’d like to add more oil; if you do, once again drizzle it in in a continuous stream, whisking constantly, until the dressing tastes the way you like.
Sprinkle salt over lettuce leaves and, using clean hands, toss to distribute salt evenly.
Add about half the dressing to the sides of the mixing bowl and, using clean hands, toss lettuce leaves gently to coat with dressing. Taste to determine if there is sufficient dressing; if not, add dressing a little at a time, tossing between each addition, until leaves are dressed to your liking.
If you are like me, or rather like my wife, then you will want your salad overdressed, as it is here:
It doesn’t look quite as nice as a properly dressed salad, but if you like the dressing, and I do, it isn’t half bad. Good enough to eat nearly every night, really.